Meta

Climate Disruption

This isn’t going to be an easy post to read, but I believe it looks at some important questions.

At Cotyledon right now, three out of four of the folks living here (basically everyone except me) are involved with the Extinction Rebellion. Wesley, the newest person in our house, is very heavily involved.

Wesley describes himself as a farmer but he came to New York City to help out with the Extinction Rebellion, which he sees as our last best chance to save the planet. He is not optimistic. It’s discussions with him that inspired this post.

If anyone still doubts that climate change is real, look at the record breaking temperatures in Alaska, along with the accompanying wildfires. (Which inspired someone to dub the state of the state, ‘Baked Alaska’.) Wesley said that he never expected to be a ‘prepper’, but given what he knows now, he is headed in that direction.

So what are the communes doing to cope with climate change? And what is any of this worth if we really are doomed?

Wesley pointed out to me that the most likely first major catastrophe is likely to be disruption of the food supply chain. One statistic I have seen tossed around is that stores only hold about a three day supply of food. Fortunately, most of the rural communities grow a significant portion of their own food. Not true of Cotyledon in urban New York, but we are associated with the Ranch and have an urban farm (Hellgate) only a couple of streets away.

Unfortunately, if the food supply did run out, there would be lots of very hungry people who would not care who the food technically belonged to. Also, dumpster diving would be pretty useless in a food emergency; if there was no food in the stores, there wouldn’t be any food in the dumpsters.

Empty Stores

Many communes and other communities are also pioneers in off the grid living, which may be essential in a climate emergency. But the real thing that communities offer in any crisis is support and companionship and large doses of cooperation. If you are living in a community, you are not alone and isolated, and this is even more true if you are living in a commune.

This was brought home to me the morning after Donald Trump was elected. This was not something most of us were expecting, and many of us were in shock. If I had been living alone, I would have had to deal with this all by myself. I was living in Ganas and we had a community meeting that morning (as we did most mornings) and we talked together about how we would deal with this.

Communities are built to do things together and income-sharing communities even more so. We have far more collective intelligence and creativity and strength in community than any one of us has alone or even just a couple has together. As the challenges pile up, it makes more and more sense to me to figure this out communally.

But, and here’s the horrible question I began with: what if we are all doomed? First of all, I don’t think that is a given and I believe that the collective intelligence of communities makes our survival more likely. But it’s a possibility that I think we must consider. And if we need to consider it, then I think that we need to think about hospice care for the human race. When a person is dying, we try to make them comfortable, we try to figure out how to help them die well. I think that we may need to consider this for us all. And I cannot think of any better place to do this than in community where we have always focused on taking care of each other.

I don’t want to end on a down note, and I do believe that it is an honest question whether we will survive or not, but I think that either way, communes and communities are an important part of the process of either making it through or leaving the planet gracefully.

Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!

Last week our community, Cotyledon, sponsored a talk by a researcher from the Czech Republic. It’s been a strange few weeks at Cotyledon, with Swedish and Czech and Australian visitors coming one after another.

Our Czech visitor, Jan Blažek, gave a presentation on Eco-communities in Europe at a local artists space for us. We decided to have some of the NYC area communities get a chance to respond to his talk and have representatives from Cotyledon (me), Ganas, and Arc38 (which is in the countryside a bit north of the city) there to react.

Jan Blazek

This set me to thinking about how the communes that I know of approach sustainability.

As I said in my part in the discussion following Jan’s presentation, Cotyledon began with a focus on food justice and urban agriculture. I have written about our relationship with Smiling Hogshead Ranch. Even though we are embedded in New York City, we are clear that we are concerned with working with nature and growing soil, plants, and food. We have also become increasingly involved with the Extinction Rebellion–a movement to take radical action against climate disruption.

And we are one of the more urban of the communes.

The banner for the presentation

The rural communes have even more of a focus on agriculture and food production. I have seen the crops growing at East Brook, Twin Oaks, Acorn, Mimosa, Sandhill, East Wind, and Oran Mor. There are major dairy programs at Twin Oaks and East Wind and both Acorn and Rainforest Lab used to have lots of goats. (Sadly, both of these communities had to give up their goats.) While few of these communities are fully self sufficient, they grow a large amount of their own food. Most of them also dumpster, as do the folks at Compersia in DC and us at Cotyledon. Dumpstering takes food out of the waste stream. I believe these things are also true at the Mothership and Rainforest Lab and Ionia, but I haven’t been to any of them. (Although there is a sweet video about making grape juice at the Mothership.)

The communes in Virginia helped set up Living Energy Farm, which is a demonstration site for fossil fuel free living. Cambia community also spends much of their time demonstrating ecological living, with many teaching exhibits and a passion for reaching out to young people.

Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!

Ecovillage Design – Principles and Practices

We now have significant experience designing ecovillages both in rural and urban settings and this workshop will take stock of what has been learned over the last 30 years. There are sustainability elements, aesthetic aspects and design components connected with high degrees of sharing which all go into making a high functioning ecovillage. In many cases these are not elements which are taught in architecture school. We will explore conversions of existing non-ecovillages as well as designed from scratch solutions. The workshop will start with presentation and then go into question and answer.

Fred Oesch – Architect/Ecovillage Designer

Fred Oesch is a licensed architect who designed the seed building at Acorn and lives in Schuyler VA. He has also been involved in several ecovillage projects, both urban and rural as well as new builds and conversions. He serves on the Ecovillage Charlottesville Board and throws a mean quarry party.

Site of ecological design and excellent parties

Some of what is covered in the workshop is Principles of Regenerative Environmental Design:

Feeling helpless and hopeless about climate disruption? Some of the most powerful solutions are in places most people are not looking.

In 1985, Amory Lovins wrote the ground breaking article, “Saving Gigabucks withNegawatts,” where he argued that utility customers don’t want kilowatt-hours of electricity; they want energy services such as hot showers, cold beer, lit rooms, and spinning shafts, which can come more cheaply if electricity is used more efficiently. Intentional communities and especially income sharing communes can use a similar approach to reducing their carbon footprint.

Same services, less electricity

You can think of communities and climate in a way similar to negawatts. People living in community don’t really care if they own a car or bicycle or set of clothing. What they want are transportation services and clothing services. If these can be provided more efficiently than through personal ownership then their needs are met. This is where radical sharing comes in and changes the entire climate discussion.